equipment found near switches
- Thread starter shaun_rt
- Start date
Yes.. Blender is free
https://www.blender.org
https://www.blender.org
johnwhelan
Well-known member
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Trainz/Tutorial_for_Blender needs 2.79b or earlier. 2.8 uses .fbx export into Trainz.
Cheerio John
Cheerio John
I don't create assets, so maybe have no business here, but I notice on threads where they are creating things like locomotives, is that there don't seem to be any circles. Things like wheels, bogies, and other round objects seem to be a series of short straight lines (pizza slices if you will) instead of circles. Is that a limit of these types of software?
Think of making a perfectly smooth curve out of Lego(TM) blocks. View it from a distance and it will look smooth. Close up, it is Lego. That is the limitation built into digital data - everything is either a 1 or a 0 there is no value in between.
If you use a graphics editor and type the text number 0 or the letter "O" and then zoom into it with maximum magnification you will see that the solid black blocks of the text are surrounded by blocks of different shades of grey. This is "anti-aliasing", a trick used to fool the eyes into believing that a perfectly smooth curve can be constructed from Lego blocks.
Most 3D graphics design programs (e.g. Blender) use polygons to create surfaces. The more complex the surface, the more polygons that are needed. Smoother boundary curves need smaller polygons and many more of them.
If you use a graphics editor and type the text number 0 or the letter "O" and then zoom into it with maximum magnification you will see that the solid black blocks of the text are surrounded by blocks of different shades of grey. This is "anti-aliasing", a trick used to fool the eyes into believing that a perfectly smooth curve can be constructed from Lego blocks.
Most 3D graphics design programs (e.g. Blender) use polygons to create surfaces. The more complex the surface, the more polygons that are needed. Smoother boundary curves need smaller polygons and many more of them.
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Dinorius_Redundicus
kuid 68213
There are no solid objects in the real world that have perfectly continuous curves either. It’s just that the “polygons” have atomic dimensions. The real world has the worst LOD system ever conceived.
LOL but the graphics card is pretty good. :hehe:
That's still way too big. Lets go down to the Planck Length and get into the vibrational frequencies of multi-dimensional quantum strings.
Amen to that.
I guess that makes sense, but I guess I thought a 3D rendering program would have a "circle" tool that would make a circle shape. Of course it would be pixilated at some level, but I thought they would be circles and ovals to the casual viewer. I mean in the 2d world even flow charts and Excel charts will do that.
The problem with using circles and ovals is when you pack them close together to fill a surface area there will be gaps between them - what goes in those gaps?. The only way to eliminate the gaps is to use a shape made of straight lines, not curves. The same applies to tiling your bathroom floor - square, rectangular, polygon shapes work, curved shapes do not.
The other problem with rendering curves and rounded objects is the amount of maths needed to calculate and draw the perfectly smooth surface, which in reality is still made up of very tiny segments. With lots and lots of tiny segments needed to create the smooth surface, the programs can easily run out of memory and the CPU and video card can be overburdened enough to crash the computer. We've come a long way but still need to generate polygon objects instead of infinitely smooth curved or rounded surfaces.
